My Case Against God

First Principle: Evidence is the best, most reliable way for humans to approximate truth as we interrogate the world of experience.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Exploding Comfortable, Comforting Myths

At
times, I feel quite disconnected from the society of which I am part,
and one of the most powerful reasons for this feeling is the
pervasive mythology that plagues the thinking of large swaths of the
population, across ideological, political and religious groupings.
These myths, whether they are held for reasons of comfort or because
of misapprehension, delusion or childhood inculcation, always have
been, and still remain, false. In this essay, I strive to expose the
artifice behind these foundational myths, allowing us to look at the
world head-on and without the hollow false comforts of wishful
thinking and primitive superstition.

No
myth is more widespread—bridging huge ideological chasms to connect
groups that, otherwise, have enormously divergent philosophies—than
that of anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism: the notion that
human beings are the central, most significant form of life and are
categorically different from other animals. Now, of course, the Homo
sapiens sapiens
subspecies has anatomical and physiological characteristics to
distinguish it from other creatures, such as Ursus
arctos horribilis, Phrynosoma modestum
and Bison
bison athabascae, and
no one seeks to deny that. Divisions of kingdom, phylum, class,
order, family and so forth are made because of real, true differences
between forms of life, and to pretend they do not exist would be to
deny biological reality. Every species is qualitatively different
from every other species; that is the reason for their having been
distinguished in the first place.

The
myth lies in the notion that there are human beings, and then there
is the rest of the animal kingdom: the idea that there is a category
we may call “animals,” which does not include Homo
sapiens sapiens, and
then a category called “people,” in which we place ourselves. A
more correct division would be to identify non-human animals and
human animals because, given the truth of Darwinian evolution and
universal common descent, there is but a single tree of life and we
are very much a part of it, right alongside grizzly bears, the
roundtail horned lizard and the wood bison. Our bodies, including the
immensely complex brains we are endowed with that create the illusion
of an “I” inside—the illusory ghost haunting our fleshy
machine—were shaped by the same dispassionate, undirected, mindless
natural forces as shaped the bodies of every other creature that does
exist or ever has existed.

People
often go to great lengths to explicate the incredible things of which
human beings are capable—constructing giant skyscrapers, composing
gorgeous symphonies, creating paintings whose beauty is breathtaking,
writing novels whose power resonates generation after generation,
making altruistic sacrifices for the sake of others—and then, from
that, attempt to justify treating human beings as “special” or
possessing a higher level of “intrinsic value” than other
creatures possess. Although one could argue that all of these
characteristics serve to distinguish human beings from other animals,
no one has yet advanced a convincing argument as to why these
characteristics,
as opposed to other
characteristics,
should be considered value-adding ones. Hummingbirds' heart rate can
reach as high as 1,260 beats per minute. The cheetah has the ability
to accelerate from zero to more than 60mph in three seconds. Why are
these not value-adding characteristics? What authority gets to decide
which traits confer greater intrinsic value and which are intrinsic
value-neutral? It should be clear that all such judgments are merely
dressed-up speciesism.

Connected
with the fallacy of anthropocentrism are the interconnected myths of
human rights and objective, prescriptive morality. In The Declaration
of Independence, our founding fathers wrote, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It often
seems that people declare this or that to be self-evident when there
is no evidence available to support the contention. Given the fact
that the Darwinian tree of life birthed us exactly as it did catfish
and koalas, there is no evidenced foundation to say that human beings
have rights merely by virtue of being human. From whom would these
mysterious rights come? How would they be known? To which species
would they be bestowed, and by what standard would they be applied? A
man could walk in front of a crazed person with a gun and declare,
“You may not shoot me. I have a right to life.” If the person
then shot the man dead, I, as an observer, would be tempted to say,
“Well, so much for that.” Even if one entertains the notion of
nebulous rights endowed by an imagined creator to a single evolved
species among billions of evolved species (inclusive of bacteria and
archaea) ever to exist, it seems a trivial pursuit when these wispy
rights can be so easily transgressed.

The
truth, for an evidentialist, is that there is no reason to believe
human rights—or any rights at all—exist, apart from those
codified by governments and applied to their citizens in a legalistic
manner. There is also no reason to believe objective, prescriptive
morality has any connection to actual truth about the universe we
inhabit, because, if we postulate such morality, we run into the same
unanswerable questions: From whom would these moral rules come? How
would they be known? Which species would be yoked with these moral
rules, and by what standard would the rules be applied? Consider a
thought experiment: Virtually everybody would agree that murder is
wrong. (And, on a subjective, personal level, I agree.) So, suppose
somebody declares that, because murder is morally wrong, one should
not murder. A valid question to ask is, “Why is murder wrong?”
The answer might be because it harms people and deprives them of
their right to life. A valid follow-up question, after dispelling the
notion of a “right to life,” is, “Why is harming people wrong?”
And, no matter what the answer is, the “Why?” questions could
continue in perpetuity. All moral rules are built upon assumptions,
and that is why objective, prescriptive morality is incompatible with
evidentialism.

Darwinian
forces have shaped us to survive as a species, and it seems obvious
that, given our cooperative and constructive instincts, community
building is an important component of individual fitness. A hominid
society plagued by widespread murder, theft, deception, rape and
destruction would not long last as a society and, thus, individual
members' genetic material would not be passed down and the Darwinian
imperative to multiply would be unfulfilled. That is why, overall,
the human conscience deplores murder, assault and the like: We have
been evolutionarily trained to believe that society-building
behaviors are good and society-destroying behaviors are bad. And that
is likely why, on a subjective, personal level, I am appalled by
murder.

However,
a crudely functional moral code that has been instilled so that
self-replicating instructions for self-replication—genetic
material—can be passed down can hardly be considered the basis for
an objective morality that seeks to say, “Behavior A is really,
truly wrong, whereas Behavior B is really, truly virtuous.” The
truth is, nothing is truly right or truly wrong...genuinely good or
genuinely bad...righteous or wicked. The universe does not care and,
in the grand scheme, as it accelerates its expansion, the universe
will eventually become a cold, dark nothingness, leaving not a trace
of our trials, tribulations, joys or sorrows. It will be as though
nothing ever existed. On the universal scale—that is to say,
objectively—it does not make a whit of difference whether one
person kills another or saves his life; it matters not whether one is
Adolf Hitler or Norman Borlaug. And any instinct we feel that says
otherwise (including my own deeply felt instincts) can be chalked up
to our fundamental nature: elaborate machines whose sole job is to
preserve self-replicating instructions for self-replication.

Another
myth, this one among the most insufferable of all, is American
exceptionalism, which is a relation to the similarly fallacious human
exceptionalism (already addressed). Largely the product of
neoconservative thought, this is the idea that the United States has
unique rights and responsibilities as the leader among nations and is
charged with spreading liberty and democracy. This notion is
predicated upon a number of mistakes, foremost among them the belief
in objective good and evil (that is to say, the United States gains
unique moral authority by being a righteous nation in opposition to
wicked ones) and the supposition that having this or that
characteristic (certain founding principles, a specific kind of
national spirit, having emerged from a revolution, etc.) confers
special rights.

One can cite any particular distinguishing fact about
the United States, just as one can cite unique attributes of human
beings, but it will not help in the slightest in connecting that
distinguishing fact with the bestowal of special rights and
responsibilities. Analogously to the case of Animalia, there are any number of
countries, each with its own attributes and history; simply recognizing this does not make one country categorically different
from all the others, nor does it cause magic “rights” suddenly to
appear. Every country is on the same plane, struggling for its
subjective goals and trying to execute its subjective will. The will
of our country cannot be considered any more objectively righteous
than that of Iran, because any attempt to demonstrate such with
evidence will be poisoned by ungrounded value judgments.

The
final myth with which I will concern myself is more societal in
nature: that ethnicity, skin color and sex are meaningful standards
by which to group people. It seems obvious that human beings are
human beings, just like grizzly bears are grizzly bears, and it is a
rather trivial bit of happenstance that a person is born in Venezuela
as opposed to in Italy, or in the United States as opposed to in
Japan. Although it is certainly true that regional and national
cultures can be materially different from one another and, in some
ways, it truly is meaningfully different to be an Italian than to be
a Cuban, the commonalities that humans share—including those
evolutionarily inculcated instincts that I referred to, which serve
to ensure that genetic material can be passed down—supersede mere
details of culture. Even less meaningful than ethnicity is race,
which, ultimately, simply relates to the melanin in the skin and
nothing more substantial than that. Homo
sapiens sapiens comprises
a single species, across all ethnic and racial lines, because all
such differences are superficial and, ultimately, inconsequential.

With
respect to the sexes, it makes sense to look at things through a
Darwinian prism once again. The principal difference between the
sexes is reproductive and, thus, it is sensible to approach the issue
in that vein, because it informs virtually all the supposed lines
of distinction, behavioral and otherwise, meant to separate male and
female human beings. Given that males have an essentially unlimited
supply of spermatozoa and a relatively small reproductive
investment—again, bearing in mind that we, and all creatures, are
merely elaborate machines whose function is to preserve
self-replicating instructions for self-replication—it is in males'
Darwinian interest to impregnate as many females as possible, thus
ensuring prolific offspring. Given that females do not have an
unlimited supply of ova and, even more importantly, have a nine-month
reproductive investment, it is in females' Darwinian interest to be
very choosy about who their partner is.

This truth, I believe, underlies
societal behavior codes pertaining to the man courting the woman
(i.e.,
asking her out, paying for dates, trying to woo her). In the most
basic terms, men are evolutionarily programmed to be less sexually
discriminating and women are programmed to be more discerning, all owing
to differential gametes and reproductive investments. The question
then becomes whether we allow ourselves to be slaves to inclinations
inculcated by mindless Darwinian forces, or whether we choose to eschew crudely inborn instinct for something else.

Our
society is utterly awash in myths...false beliefs that pervade our
thinking, our ideologies, our philosophies and our lives. One wonders
the kind of society we would have if people, at long last, retired
their spurious beliefs, replacing them instead with mere truth.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

god's Farcical Role as 'Explanation'

One of the most common
"arguments" that I, as an atheist, hear regarding god's alleged
necessity is that, given the incredible complexity (or beauty, or wonder, or
intricacy) of certain components of the natural order (i.e., the human eye, the bacterial flagellar motor, the human
brain), the only possible explanation for the existence of such complexity is
an intelligent designer, which is then read as god. The ludicrousness of this argument
cannot be overstated. It is pure farce to point to something like the human eye
or the bacterial flagellar motor—much less, with respect to the origins of life, an ultimately simple single-celled organism—and "explain" its existence,
as Christians feebly attempt, by citing an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent
deity whose nature defines good and evil, who developed an infallible plan in
which every one of us plays a part, who is concerned with and monitors our
behavior, who reigns over heaven, who listens to and occasionally answers
prayers that are transmitted by hushed murmuring, and who sent a son—with whom
he exists as part of a mysterious trinity—to die for humanity's sins, after which he
resurrected his son bodily. To call this monstrosity—this haphazardly stapled-on
appendage—an "explanation" is to make oneself appear to be a fool.